[image is from here]
[What follows has been partially revised and added to after the post was initially written. Later revision on 24 September 2010 ECD. Last revision of one paragraph, on the objectification of breasts by men, was done on 31 August 2012.]
Above, witness the perennially pink human in medical diagrams and illustrations. (I have yet to meet one pink person, btw.) Ah, white (or is it pink?) supremacist racism. It finds its way into every area of society in which white people live.
I will take us on a little journey, into the world of sexism and heterosexism in the discussion of human sexuality. We will examine the G-spot on route to the P-spot. And we may take some side trips along the way from point G to point P.
First, a question to the reading audience:
Women's breasts are "presented" socially, by pimps and advertisers, as "things for men", "things" to be used by men, mounds between which to thrust the penis, a thing to be cosmetically/surgically altered, lifted, bloated with silicone or saline pouches, a thing for men to poke, a thing for men to fetishise in the imagination, a thing for men to look at and touch, if not grab and grope in reality. Especially--and quite unnaturally--the most fake breasts are fetishised by normal men; giant breasts are drooled over or ejaculated onto--if the ejaculate isn't deposited onto the face of the person; the person with the breasts is believed to "like it" whenever a man ejaculates anywhere near, in, or on her (i.e., usually a woman). Corporate pimps, advertising executives, clothing manufacturers, and television producers* all make it their business to promote the breast as a thing, or breasts as a pair of things which had better be (unnaturally) identical, and has better be exposed for some men's view to some degree. Men demand to know the contours of women's breasts, to see the form, to discern the shape, and to have the collective power to make that be so by controlling industries that make women's breasts readily available to men.
*Anyone would be hard-pressed to distinguish between those four groups of overwhelmingly wealthy white men.
There's a controversial and somewhat mythological* part of human female anatomy--not the breast--that may or may not exist, but has been promoted by het men as yet another reason why their dicks need to be in women's vaginas--allegedly for women. (When the dick isn't between the woman's breasts or buttocks, of course.) It has been termed the G-spot, named, wouldn't you know it, after a man (Dr. Ernst Grafenberg)! And women can welcome men near them and envelope men's penises should they wish, desire, and want to do so.
*From Wikipedia:
A study using ultrasound found women who report having vaginal orgasms do have thicker tissue in the G-Spot region, but this could be an extension of the clitoris rather than a separate structure. Another study of 1,800 twins found that 56% of women surveyed reported having a G-Spot, although this cannot be considered a representative study.[4] Sexual psychologists are concerned women may label themselves "dysfunctional" if they cannot find a G-Spot,[5] and women have had plastic surgery done to enhance G-Spot sensitivity. The largest study to date on the G-Spot found its existence unproven and subjective among women.[6] The study based its results on questionnaires and personal experience.
Sexual psychologists are concerned about the promotion of the G-Spot, as it could lead to women feeling "dysfunctional" if they do not experience it. Dr. Petra Boynton points out:[5]
We're all different. Some women will have certain area within the vagina which will be very sensitive, and some won't - but they won't necessarily be in the area called the G spot. If a woman spends all her time worrying about whether she is normal, or has a G spot or not, she will focus on just one area, and ignore everything else. It's telling people that there is a single, best way to have sex, which isn't the right thing to do.
* * *
Indeed.And sexist politics are prevalent in any social discussion of women's bodies, especially when the subject is sex. *Here* we have a website created to tell men "how to master the woman's g-spot". And how many sites are there instructing women on how to master men's P-spot? And how many ultrasounds were done while men experienced pleasure rectally? And how many studies have been done on this matter? There is a kind of privacy of the body that men enjoy that women are not afforded in patriarchal, misogynistic, sexist societies.
A society that seeks to undermine women's sexual and physical autonomy from men and male systems will do whatever it takes to bind women to beliefs that are not in their best interests. Exhibit A: "feminine hygiene" products. Bodies have various smells. In case those het male researchers, marketers, and advertisers haven't noticed, men's crotches smell. So too does the area between men's buttocks. Are men sold "masculine hygiene" products, and told to attend to themselves before they let anyone move their face "down there"? In what sense don't men need "freshening" up? Would life be better if men's crotches smelled perpetually like spring meadows? How would it be if children were gathered in a room watching television with parents and ads came on the air repeatedly reminding men to use "dippety-douche"--a product men can lower their genitals into to make sure they smell like lilacs--for those times when men want to feel most confident?
Why do so many girls and young women not welcome oral sex being performed on them? I have heard, with sad regularity, young women speak to me about how they are terribly self-conscious about "what they smell like down there". I remind them that it is tremendously probable that women smell human down there, just as men's crotches smell human. And that boys and men don't seem especially obsessed about their own crotch's smell.
Advertising works, or it wouldn't exist as a multi-million dollar business. Girls and women, along with boys and men, absorb the message, delivered without relief, that their genitals need to be attended to with chemical washes and rinses before a boy or man's face can go near it. And what are the "cleansers" called for men to use to wash their crotches, besides soap? This matter of women's bodies, and specifically their genitals, being "dirty" is a powerful message in many patriarchal societies. Sometimes women are made to "go away" while menstruating. Some cultures require women to not go near social places or food while they are bleeding "down there". As if women stir-fry or order in a pizza using their crotches.
What women want is never central in the sexxx that is manufactured by male pimps. The reasons women's bodies are invaded or violated are certainly not due to women's mass demand for such mistreatment--unless you actually believe what trafficked and pimped women are made to say in front of a camera. The pimp-speak scripted for women to say (or grunt) in pornography films is not imagined with women's human rights in mind. Where in the world do women have full control over their bodies such that men approach them only when women desire, wish, welcome, and want men to?
I wish it were the case that only when all those criteria were met (desiring, wishing, welcoming, and wanting), did vaginal-penile intercourse occur. Alas, everything from incest, molestation, rape, assault, and other forms of unwelcomed and unwanted violence against and violation of women and girls ensures that this activity will occur when het men want it to, not women... or girls... or infant human females.
What misogynistic, racist, and callous men do routinely to women's bodies is gross. And when men do it, women get stigmatised as the gross, dirty ones. How "fucked up" is that?!?
There is a less contested part of men's anatomy--not at all mythic, called "the prostate gland" which only gets discussed in dominant media when the term "cancer" is in the same sentence or news story. When is the last time you heard, on national news broadcasts, or on "morning shows", the prostate gland discussed as one of males' several sexually responsive organs?
Due to a combination of institutionalised and naturalised heterosexism, and profound and virulent levels of homophobia and misogyny, men's rectum's being penetrated in sex, as sex, is seen as "feminising" of the man who engages in this sort of behavior. In some societies, it is only the male who takes the penis into his body (note how often women doing this is not phrased that way!) who is socially seen as "gay". The male who sticks his dick in women and men, or whose dick is enveloped and gripped by women or men, is not seen to be gay. Such a man is seen as heterosexual.
This is but one reason why I say that sexual orientation is a social, not "natural" phenomenon.
There is a stigma attached to the body that sometimes has a penis inside it. The stigma--not a natural one--is generated socially and politically by being degraded by men's violent acts of invasion and violation of women's bodies. Due to the degradation of women by men, at times involving the penetration of her body by a penis, all forms of penetrative sex carry this stigma. The accepter of the penis is potentially degraded in the act, not at all because of something inherent to the act. The stigma comes from the frequency with which het-active men utilise these acts as means to achieve degradation and dehumanisation of people. Therefore the physical act of having a penis in your body is stigmatised as dirtying, degrading, and feminising. As Dworkin noted in her book Intercourse, women are (effectively) dirt to men who use them in dirty, degrading ways.
So all those butch het boys who want to never appear to be anything other than "masculine", may reply "no thank you" to the opportunity to experience sexual pleasure that may be achieved by massaging the prostate gland, which is finger deep in men's rectums, unless it has been removed surgically. Note how women's alleged G-spot is not so likely to be thought of as something that ought to be approached with great care and overt and meaningful consent. Note how men do not take "no thank you" or "no, not interested" or just "no" as a sufficient indicator of her wish not to do what men ask women to do, sexually, that he wants to do. Note how we don't assume that if a man says no to anally penetrative sex, she has a right to force her way in. And if he allows her to play near his anus, we don't assume that means he's consenting to her jamming something into his ass.
To all het men who are nervous about having your anus penetrated during sex: please "do unto others as you would have done unto you" when it comes to penetrating anyone's body, in any way, with anything, including your dick. And learn how to have non-penetrative sex, non-phallocentric (or phallocratic) sex. You'd be surprised what sex can be, if you take the focus off your own dick long enough to discover the rest of your body, and, if heterosexually active, the rest of women's bodies too.
Het men who are sexually active ought to be made to learn about female anatomy, and be socially required to be deprogrammed of pornographic sexxxuality before being allowed near anyone to engage in sexual behavior. Interpersonally, het men who plan to be sexually active with a woman ought to seek out from her information about what she enjoys, prefers, doesn't like, doesn't want to be asked to do, and is triggered by, sexually. There's no physiological, hormonal, genetic, or anatomical reason het men can't ask for this information BEFORE you put your dick near a woman's body.
And perhaps if we spoke more about the prostate gland as a sex organ, and discussed how to stimulate it, we'd be more mindful of how it might feel to have women's vaginas be discussed as if they were not part of women's lives, their human histories as vulnerable and vibrant human beings.
Newsflash to het men: your anuses, as well as your rectums and prostate glands, are potentially part of your lives, your histories as vulnerable and vibrant human beings.
When het men can't figure out why women don't want to have sex with them, what do they do? Either blame the women or get all effemiphobic about the matter, rather than looking at what else is going on in women's lives. Even when they read feminist analysis, they reject it as "the explanation" because, after all, white het men know what's really going on, right? Wrong. What follows is from *here*. It's from the Telegraph.co.uk. My reply to him appears after his silly attempt at social analysis.
Why do so many women never have sex? Because feminised men are too busy fixing their hair
According to a report in today’s Daily Mail, a quarter of British women over 35 say they “never” have sex. The figure rises to 38 per cent in Scotland, while women in the Midlands are most likely to have sex regularly, with 32 per cent claiming they make love once a week.
Could the explanation be that men’s libidos aren’t what they used to be? No, according to the Mail. It was ever thus. It cites a new book called The Sex Starved Wife by American author Michele Weiner Davis. “As a society, we’ve perpetuated this myth about the ever-turned-on-male,” says Weiner Davis. “But all my research suggests that the differences between the genders aren’t as great as we’ve been led to believe.”
I’m not so sure. I think the male libido is in decline — and I blame the feminisation of men that has taken place over the past 15 years or so. Like most trends, this one began in America and has now crossed the Atlantic. I remember being shocked on first entering the bathroom of an American male in 1995. There, carefully lined up on a stainless steel shelf, was a larger array of beauty products than you’d expect to see in Cheryl Cole’s boudoir. Admittedly, this was a sophisticated New Yorker in his mid-30s — a metrosexual, if you will — but even so. Did he really have to go to bed every night wearing a mask of Kiehl’s Facial Fuel? It seemed extraordinary.
Fifteen years later, it is now the norm. British men in their twenties spend a small fortune on cosmetic products. Back in the eighties, we would have been worried about being called “gay” if we used fake tan, but that fear has gone the way of the Sinclair C5. When I find myself in the West End on a Friday night, I see young men who have clearly spent as much time getting ready as your average woman. And I’m not just talking about Old Compton Street.
At the risk of sounding like a Grumpy Old Man, I do find this trend pretty reprehensible. Vain women are bad enough, but there’s nothing more pathetic than a vain man. In Shakespeare’s plays, over-attention to dress is always the hallmark of a fool, from Osric’s bonnet to Malvolio’s garters. Since the dawn of time, manliness has always been synonymous with a complete indifference to personal grooming. It’s not simply that real men don’t eat quiche; they don’t moisturise, either.
Surely, it is this gender reversal — with men becoming more like women as women become more like men — that accounts for the decline in male sexual desire. It is hard to imagine a metrosexual throwing a woman over his shoulders and marching off into the primeval forest — he’d be too worried about messing up his hair.
I’m currently reading a book called Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism by the feminist writer Natasha Walter. She believes contemporary British women have recently taken a step backwards and begun to embrace sexual identifies — personified by glamour models like Jordan — that demean and degrade them. She sees this as evidence of a creeping misogyny, with men and women reverting to patriarchal sexual stereotypes:
I don’t dispute her data, but I think her theory’s all wrong. When young women engage in sexually provocative behaviour, wearing short skirts, flashing their boobs, and so forth, they are not trying to please men. On the contrary, it’s a form of brutal triumphalism. Having won the battle of the sexes, leaving men broken and emasculated, women are now rubbing our faces in it by parading about in outfits that, not so long ago, might have triggered a sexual response. Hardly surprising, then, that 35 per cent of British women aren’t getting any. I’m amazed that 65 per cent still are.
The issue isn’t the “feminisation” of men, as you so misogynistically put it. The problem is rather the opposite:
Men’s sexual lives are so increasingly and addictively entwined with and tethered to pornography that men would rather have sex with themselves in front of a computer screen than have sex with a human being.
If heterosexual, having sex with a female human being “annoyingly” (to boy-men) means men have to be “responsive” and… imagine this: unselfish.
As I see it, and hear about it from women, female human beings are fed up with men’s selfish sex being “all sex is” and would rather go without, for damn good reason.
And plenty of women are having sex, alone, or with other women. And they may not be reporting on just how much better that sex is than when they were with the wanker first husbands who would rather wank using their wives as their right hands, than figure out how to be emotionally and physically connected to another human being and showing interest in giving her pleasure that isn’t based on HIS (read: pimps’) fantasies. Maybe pimped women on drugs isn’t many women’s idea of “a standard” to live up to, including the women who are being controlled and drugged up by pimps.
Maybe women are getting tired of hearing their pathetic boyfriends whine for them to work a pole… for men’s pleasure, not women’s.
Maybe women are sick and tired of men with arrested sexual and emotional development.
Maybe women aren’t interested in men who think women should have helium in their breasts, flat stomachs, and hairless bodies.
Maybe women are tired of doing all the oppressive and annoying stuff women have been coerced into doing for men who don’t really appreciate them after they do all that stuff.
The women I know are having great sex with men who are poets, and artists, who care about women as people, and who don’t expect women to look twenty when they’re fifty. Men who actually LIKE and are ATTRACTED to women in their forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond. Maybe women are tired of having some silly version of sex with men who, aesthetically and sensually, are obnoxious boys in adult male bodies.
It’s easier to blame it on cosmetics, though, isn’t it Toby? The truth hurts. Check out the “Make Love, Not Porn” website and find out why women aren’t having sex with porn addicts. See: http://www.makelovenotporn.com/